"Opposing Poetries "presents a selection of Hank Lazer's writing on a range of issues in contemporary American poetry. Through a series of recurring cultural, material, and institutional perspectives, Lazer investigates the assumptions and habits that govern conflicting conceptions of contemporary American poetry, while refining, reconsidering, and questioning his own and modern theorists' assertions and claims relating to experimental poetry.
Volume One examines the shift in the governing assumptions of contemporary poetic practice. Lazer inspects the key critical works addressing...

"Paradise & Method: Poetics and Praxis" collects nearly two decades of work on poetics by one of the pioneers of the "language poetry" movement.
Addressing poetics from a poet's perspective, Andrews focuses on the ways in which meaning is produced and challenged. His essays aim "to map out opportunities for making sense (or making noise)--both in reading and writing contemporary literature. At the center has been a desire to explore "language, "as up close as possible, as a material and social medium for restagings of meaning and power." Andrews analyzes poetics and the production of...

Must poetic form be, as Yeats demanded, "full, sphere-like, single," or can it accommodate the impurities Yeats and his Modernist generation found so problematic? Sixty years later, these are still open questions, questions Marjorie Perloff addresses in these essays.

A literary and cultural study of three diverse manifestations in artistic exploration in the 1920s and 1930s - the groups surrounding Jorge Luis Borges, W.H. Auden, and Andre Breton. These groups were composed of poets and writers who made use of the avant-garde's characteristic modes of self-expression: the publication of small journals; unorthodox attention-getting tactics; and interaction with the mainstream press. However, their differing aesthetic, social and political agendas illustrate the broad range of avant-gardism in the interwar era.

In "Poetic Culture, " Christopher Beach questions the cultural significance of poetry, both as a canonical system and as a contemporary practice. By analyzing issues such as poetry's loss of audience, the "anthology wars" of the 1950s and early 1960s, the academic and institutional orientation of current poetry, the poetry slam scene, and the efforts to use television as a medium for presenting poetry to a wider audience, Beach presents a sociocultural framework that is fundamental to an understanding of the poetic medium. While calling for new critical methods that allow us to examine poetry...

In recent criticism, Samuel Beckett's prose has been increasingly described as a labor of refusal: not only of what traditionally has made possible narrative and the novel but also of the major conventional suppositions concerning the primacy of consciousness, subjectivity, and expression for the artistic act. Beginning from the premise that Beckett never betrays his belief in "the impossibility to express," "Saying I No More" explores the Beckettian refusal. Katz posits that the expression of voicelessness in Beckett is not silence, that the negativity and negation so evident in the great...

This study, first published in 1981, argues that the map of modernist poetry needs to be redrawn so as to include a central tradition that cannot properly be located within the Romantic-Symbolist tradition that dominated the early-20th century. Marjorie Perloff traces this tradition from its early French connection in the poetry of Rimbaud and Apollinaire as well as in Cubist, Dada and early Surrealist painting; through its various manifestations in the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound; to such postmodern landscapes without depth as the French/English language...

"Prior to Meaning "collects a decade of writing on poetry, language, and the theory of writing by one of the most innovative and conceptually challenging poets of the last twenty-five years. In essays that are wide ranging, richly detailed, and novel in their surprising juxtapositions of disparate material, Steve McCaffery works to undo the current bifurcation between theory and practice--to show how a poetic text might be the source rather than the product of the theoretical against which it must be read.

In this groundbreaking volume, Krzysztof Ziarek rethinks modern experience by bringing together philosophical critiques of modernity and avant-garde poetry.

'Pataphysics, the pseudoscience imagined by Alfred Jarry, has so far, because of its academic frivolity and hermetic perversity, attracted very little scholarly or critical inquiry, and yet it has inspired a century of experimentation. Tracing the place of 'pataphysics in the relationship between science and poetry, Christian Bok shows it is fundamental to the nature of the postmodern, and considers the work of Alfred Jarry and its influence on others.
A long overdue critical look at a significant strain of the twentieth-century avant-garde, "'Pataphysics: The Poetics of Imaginary...